One was a society woman, the other a prostitute. Together, their stories show what it was like to be an African-American woman in Old Town.
A CENTURY AGO, Lena Smith and Lillian Allen were fixtures in Portland’s North End, an area that enveloped what is today’s Old Town neighborhood.
While the setting of their existence may be well-known in folklore for its saloons, flophouses and tales of Shanghaied sailors, what’s lesser understood is that the North End was also the original hub of Portland’s small but thriving African-American community, of which Lena and Lillian were a part.
“While much discussion is had about the Albina community and the black population of Portland, the very original center of black community was around the train station,” explained local historian Janice Dilg. She’s the principle of HistoryBuilt, a Portland-based history consulting company that incorporates regional history into three-dimensional displays.
FURTHER READING: 2 sides of Oregon’s history: Exhibit juxtaposes discrimination, resistance
Dilg said railroad jobs and employment opportunities at the Portland Hotel helped establish African-Americans in Oregon.
In 1900, there were about 770 black people living in Portland, and the majority resided west of the Willamette River in the area between Northwest Kearney and Southwest Montgomery streets and from the river to what was 12th Street, according to a 1993 history report from the Portland Bureau of Planning.
During the 1910s, it was within these blocks that Lena bore witness to murder and Lillian fought alongside other women for social justice.
Lena was a prostitute, and her only marks on history came from run-ins with the law. Lillian, however, was a society woman whose name appeared at times on the pages of The Advocate and The Portland Times, two black newspapers in circulation during her lifetime.
While they sat at opposite ends of their community’s class spectrum, together their stories offer a glimpse of what it was like to be black and to be a woman in early 20th-century Portland.
WHILE BLACK-OWNED businesses dotted Northwest Flanders and Everett streets, from Mack Oliver’s grocery store on 10th Avenue down to Charles Jackson’s lunch counter on Third Street, the Golden West Hotel on Broadway Avenue was both the trophy and the heart of the black community.
In 1901, businessman William D. Allen moved from Nashville, Tenn., to Portland, where he married Montreal-native Lillian Medley in 1905. One year later, he bought the Golden West Hotel.
The hotel would serve as both a lodging accommodation for traveling African-Americans as well as a place to get an ice cream, dinner, a shave and a haircut, or other services that were denied to African-Americans at Portland’s many white-only establishments.
It was also a place to get a drink and listen to jazz performed by local musicians. The Golden West athletic club offered visitors a Turkish bath, gym and gambling hall, as well, author Kimberly Moreland noted in her book, “African Americans of Portland.”
Decades later, Dilg said, the Golden West was the only lodging accommodation in the state of Oregon that was listed in the “Green Book,” a national guidebook that listed restaurants, gas stations and other establishments where black travelers could safely stop for services.
It’s also where Lillian held women’s club meetings and other social gatherings. “There’s a real connection between the women in the black community at the time and at the Golden West Hotel in particular,” Dilg said, while holding a photocopy of the 1914 Oregon Colored Women’s Council leadership – Lillian was its president that year.
“All of these women,” Dilg said, looking at the eight faces pictured in the photo, “were separately and in conjunction with their husbands, active in social justice issues of the day. It’s hard to find a lot of information about them. We have little snippets here and there, because in The Oregonian, in The (Oregon) Journal, in The (Portland) Telegram – the newspapers of that time – they often didn’t consider what the black community was doing significant.”
Historians know Lillian also belonged to the Women’s Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a labor union in support of porters.
While most auxiliary members were the wives of porters, it’s likely that Lillian’s close proximity to these traveling railroad workers, who often stayed at the Golden West or lived in the North End, contributed to her interest in this group. A few of their wives may have been her friends.
“The growth of hotels and destinations built the need for waitstaff and the Pullman porters,” Dilg said. “That was a key job for black men that paid better than many types of jobs, so it really helped establish a bit of the first black middle class.”
Pullman porters worked on the railroads at the beck and call of white, first class passengers who degradingly called every porter by the name “George.”
The Allens owned a home in Northeast Portland, but the North End is where they and other African-American’s living around town socialized.
While Lillian’s husband was a hotel owner, most other African-American society women held titles less prestigious than that of a businessman’s wife.
For example, while Lillian served as president of the women’s council, her vice president, Kathryn Gray, worked as a restroom attendant at city parks, said Dilg. Kathryn founded the Colored Women’s Equal Suffrage League and led protests against the racist blockbuster “The Birth of a Nation” after its release in 1915. Perhaps Lillian supported her fellow club member in these endeavors.
The women’s council published a four-page newspaper, “The People’s Bulletin,” but historians only know of one issue that remains in existence, from 1917, and its tattered pages are housed at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Lillian died in 1924 at the age of 46.
It was reported that hundreds of people attended her funeral.
“She was well known and beloved,” Dilg said, adding that her funeral was “an emotional turning point in the community.”
Three years after she died, in 1927, The Advocate published a statement about the progress of the African-American community in Portland:
“We have three thousand colored people, and we are gradually increasing. For the most part we are buying our homes in all parts of the city. We have one large hotel, a newspaper, three wealthy people, a branch of the YWCA, three churches and two missions. From the economic standpoint it is very difficult for one of our race to find other than menial work, yet we have two postal clerks, one shoe clerk, two stenographers in white offices, a clerk of the Child Labor Commission in the Court House, three men in the express business, one dentist and physician, and two attorneys.”
After Lillian’s death, her husband acquired a hotel on North Interstate Avenue, the Hotel Medley, named in memory of his wife.
Lillian left behind three successful children, who all attended college. A photo of her smiling daughter, Nellie, was featured in a 1928 edition of The Advocate after she graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and accepted a faculty position at the Bishop College in Marshall, Texas. Her son, William Duncan, was faculty at Howard University’s music department and performed once at Carnegie Hall. Her youngest son, Robert, attended Howard University.
The Golden West closed in 1930 as the Great Depression swept the United States. In combination with increasing discriminatory housing practices that forced African-Americans into segregated areas of Portland, beginning in the 1920s, the economic downturn hit the black community particularly hard.
Dilg said she hopes more people come to know the name Lillian Allen and that more is learned about the lives and work of the black women who helped shape their community in Portland’s early history.
Luckily, there remains some copies of historical black newspapers from the region that Portland State University has archived and made available online. Within the yellowed pages of The Advocate, Clarion Defender, Northwest Clarion and The Portland Times, snippets about the goings-on in this community have been preserved and are available online.
A COUPLE OF blocks from the Golden West was one of Lena’s hangouts, the Union Social Club on North Park Street. This saloon was popular among black prostitutes, according to local history buff and author J.D. Chandler.
It was also a frequent target of police raids. The Oregonian, in December 1913, reported it had been raided for a third time in just three months. This time, 13 men and two women who had been “staging a dance” had been arrested. The owner, “Bird Legs,” whom Chandler has chronicled extensively, was also arrested.
Five years earlier (and before Oregon women got the right to vote in 1912), the Portland City Council had passed an ordinance that forbade women from entering any establishment where liquor was sold.
Arrests in the North End were also made easy with the passing of Oregon’s 1911 vagrancy law, which gave police the authority to arrest anyone for anything that could be loosely construed as immoral, lewd or disruptive. People would be charged with “vagrancy” and, according to entries in the arrest logs kept at the Portland City Archives, typically fined $10 and sentenced to several days in jail, although they could be punished with a sentence of up to six months and $100 fine.
The vagrancy law allowed police to frequently arrest prostitutes and punish them without proving that a transaction had occurred.
On the night of Aug. 19, 1913, when Lena was at the club with a man she had relations with, Allen Clarke, another man she had relations with walked into the club around 1 a.m. and shot Clarke right in front of her.
According to articles in The Oregonian, the shooter was a shoe shiner named William McPorter. He shot Clarke, a barber, with a small revolver, killing him, before forcing his exit and escaping.
One month earlier, according to the newspaper, Clarke had shot McPorter three times after he attacked Clarke with a knife. McPorter didn’t show up to court to press charges, and Clarke was released from jail.
The rivalry between the two men was over “the favors of Lena Smith,” the paper stated. She was arrested as a witness to Clarke’s murder.
In the handwritten script of her arrest record, still kept at Portland’s city archives, her occupation was listed as “H. maid” and her age, 37. Unfortunately, this tells us very little. She likely would have lied if she were presently working as a prostitute; in fact no prostitutes were listed in that particular log for 1913, but there were plenty of domestic workers arrested for vagrancy. Additionally, at the time, women’s ages in arrest logs were often estimated because it was considered improper to ask a woman her age.
Lena was arrested again one year later, on Nov. 5, 1914. This time her age was marked 26. Her occupation was “housekeeper.”
Kimberly Jensen, a history and gender studies professor at Western Oregon University, has studied women of this era in Portland extensively.
She said that despite the 10-year age difference, it is likely the same Lena Smith, as the African-American community was quite small at the time.
In 1914, Lena was arrested for “vagrancy” and sentenced to 10 days in jail. Several days into her sentence, a man tried to sneak her some opium by removing walnuts from their shells and then filling the shells with opium and gluing them closed. A female guard working at the jail noticed the glue and the man was arrested. It was enough to warrant a short article in The Oregonian, and in this article, Lena was described as being a prostitute who was well-known at the jail as “Toots,” indicating she was probably arrested regularly. That she had opium smuggled into the jail for her would indicate she was likely a user.
“Being a sex worker in the teens (1910s) had to just be a really challenging, a really difficult, a really debilitating situation,” said Jensen.
In general, woman of color, especially those in poor communities who were working as house maids or doing other menial labor, were very vulnerable, she said.
“There was a lot of policing of your life,” Jensen said.
Lena may have also been dealing with the trauma of witnessing the murder of a man she may have loved.
It’s unclear where Lena came from or what happened to her after 1914.
But Jensen said there are a couple other things to consider when guessing at what may have become of Lena.
For one, some women who worked as prostitutes were known to move, maybe change their names and get married. It was much easier to reinvent yourself in those days.
But it’s more likely that Lena met a less fortunate end. It’s estimated that close to one-third of all Oregonians had syphilis at that time. Someone working as a prostitute almost undoubtedly contracted syphilis or some other debilitating sexually transmitted disease during that era.
The spread of venereal disease became such a problem that during World War I, Portland became one of the first cities in the U.S. to incarcerate women who were suspected of having syphilis or gonorrhea in an attempt to keep soldiers healthy.
In 1918, Portland notoriously opened The Cedars, located at a poor farm where McMenamin’s Edgefield sits today. Jensen estimates that between 300 and 500 women were housed there. Lena’s name is not among the logs that Jensen has recovered; however, the records are incomplete.
Women would get picked up – often on vagrancy charges – and then submitted to blood tests. If they tested positive and couldn’t pay a $1,000 bail, they’d be sent to The Cedars where they would live indefinitely as a patient-prisoner who was fed and clothed, but also forced to work.
They were treated with mercury injections, said Jensen. The injections were painful, and because mercury is a poison, they had terrible side effects. Not only did the syphilis eventually affect their brains, driving them insane, but so did the mercury.
“Those treatments were awful, and having syphilis is awful,” said Jensen. “In some cases, there were charges that women were incarcerated there and they didn’t have syphilis. They weren’t allowed to have their own independent medical professional come in and do their own test.”
Once the disease appeared to go into remission – there was no cure at the time – the women were paroled.
Men with syphilis faced no such hardship.
But there was much resistance to this unjust incarceration, including from the Oregon Colored Women’s Council.
“The black club women in Portland helped to create organizations to essentially go to the court and see if they could provide support for the black women who were getting trapped in that system,” Jensen said. “I always think about women’s resistance to these policies, and I think there were a lot of ways that black women on both sides of that divide – the club women who are trying to provide some support, but also women who were trying to make their way through.”
It’s possible that Lena and Lillian crossed paths in 1910s Old Town.
“It would be absolutely fascinating to know if Lillian and Lena knew each other,” said Dilg.
There may be clues buried in the basements and attics of Portland homes that will someday reveal more about the lives of these two women and the many others who worked, fought and prayed in Old Town’s past.
“Their lives and their stories need to be told,” Jensen said. “They’ve just been erased.”
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
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